Green New Deal Is More About AOC's Economic Agenda Than Climate Change

“I said, we have an existential threat, we are in a situation where, if we don’t act quickly, we’re going to basically lose almost everything we have.  And that’s exactly the case.  It’s even more urgent now.”  Joe Biden speaking about the urgency of addressing climate change @ a campaign rally in NH in May where he claimed to introduce the first bill that addressed climate change in the 1980s – over 30 years ago.

After AOC, the de facto leader of the Democrat Party, presented her version of the Green New Deal to a group of fawning Democrat congressmen last February, all of the Democrat presidential aspirants have hopped on board to one large degree or another.  Joe Biden joined in to remind everyone that it is even more urgent now than it was the first time he told us about its urgency over 30 years ago.

 

But the devil is in the details & a check of the details of the plan reveals that AOC’s Green New Deal is in reality the largest expansion of government since LBJ’s Great Society.  It not only proposes getting the U.S. off of fossil fuels within 10 years but also providing universal healthcare, government job & housing guarantees, & a host of impractical ideas like replacing air travel with trains & upgrading & retrofitting every building in America to make them more energy efficient.  It is more about AOC’s economic agenda for America & less about eliminating carbon emissions.

 

The above understanding of the purpose of AOC’s Green New Deal plan was confirmed when AOC’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, explained to the staff of former presidential candidate Jay Inslee (one-issue climate change candidate who has now dropped out) that “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing @ all.  Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?  Because we really think of it as a how do you change the entire economy thing.”

 

Now you can check to see for yourself that AOC’s Green New Deal puts in just enough climate change points to mask that it is really about taking over the entire American way of life or as her chief of staff put it

the “economy thing.”  Just look below @ some of the points from the Senate Joint Resolution 8, entitled “A joint resolution recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal” within 10 years, but not later than 2030, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell & brought to the Senate floor for the purpose of putting senators on record supporting such a plan.

 

 

1.  establishing millions of high-wage jobs & ensuring economic security for all,

 

2.  securing clean air & water, climate & community resiliency, healthy food, access to nature, & a sustainable environment for all & promoting justice & equality,

 

3.  upgrading all existing buildings & constructing new buildings to achieve maximum energy & water efficiency,

 

4.  removing pollution & greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation & agriculture sectors – i.e., no more fossil fuels, &

 

5.  providing higher education, high-quality healthcare, & affordable, safe, & adequate housing to all.

 

The joint resolution was defeated in the Senate 57 to 0 with not one Democrat, including Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey who introduced the bill, voting for it when it counted (see photo above).

 

The urgency, or @ least the significance of making the right politically correct impression, about the Green New Deal was evidently lost on the “Google Campers” – i.e., celebrities who took 114 private jets & mega yachts valued @ between $200 million & 400 million to attend Google’s climate change conference in Sicily’s Verdura Resort last month.  The celebrities, most of whom thankfully I never heard of, very well could have used more fossil fuels getting to the conference than most people use in a year.  A classic example of do as I say, not as I do.

 

American Action Forum (AAF) headed by former Congressional Budget Office Director, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, analyzed the Green New Deal & provided a cost estimate of the several parts & its totality.

 

AAF calculated that it will cost over $5 billion just to meet

the Green New Deal’s goal of transitioning to “clean, renewable, & zero-emission energy sources” within the next 10 years.  Not to be outdone by AOC, his friend & one time presidential primary campaign worker in 2016, Bernie (also a co-sponsor of AOC’s Green New Deal) has added many bell & whistle giveaways to AOC’s mostly aspirational original plan & has

come up with his own version of the Green New Deal that is estimated to cost $16.7 trillion over the next 10 years - for both the fossil fuel elimination portion & the economic agenda portion of his plan that is not directly linked to climate policy.  To help understand why Joe Biden is considered a moderate – Biden’s climate change

plan is estimated to cost “only” $1.7 trillion in the next 10 years.

 

Bernie claims his plan will pay for itself within 15 years through a combination of new taxes, fees, & litigation against fossil fuel companies, new taxes on corporations & wealthy people, together with cuts in military spending related to U.S. reliance on oil & savings across the economy.  Source: Inside Climate News.

 

But getting back to AOC’s original Green New Deal – when all of the pieces of the above Senate Joint Resolution are added together AAF calculates the cost could be as high as $93 trillion over the next ten years.  See table below.

The Federal Reserve reports that the nation’s household net worth is currently about $108 trillion meaning that the $93 trillion estimated cost over the next ten years of AOC’s Green New Deal is just a little less than the nation’s current total wealth – the value of all assets such as stocks, savings accounts, & property minus liabilities such as personal debt.  AAF estimates the annual cost for each American household could be as high as $67,000 to meet the goals of the Green New Deal: “net zero” emissions, widespread high-speed rail service that makes air travel unnecessary, guaranteed government jobs, universal healthcare & its tax cost & diminished choices & decreased access to providers, & building, retrofitting, or otherwise upgrading every house & building in the country to maximize energy efficiency.

 

The Heritage Foundation provides the following graphic that shows the cost comparisons for electricity bills using coal versus those using wind & solar energy systems for a family of four.

The AAF report concludes that "the Green New Deal is clearly very expensive.  Its further expansion of the federal government's role in some of the most basic decisions of daily life, however, would likely have a more lasting & damaging impact than its enormous price tag."

A lot has been made the past several days about the erroneous track of many weather forecasting models that showed Hurricane Dorian going across Florida into Alabama.  Now if meteorologists can't get the forecast of a hurricane right over a period of a few days why would we trust them to surrender our way of life over climate change predictions & draconian regulations & their tremendous costs covering the next ten years?